The Mountain That Roared

Eerie Stillness Shrouds The Slopes Of Mt. St. Helens

MT. ST. HELENS NATIONAL MONUMENT, WASH. — Four thousand feet from the top, just below the treeline, it looks like just another big Northwest peak. Less awesome than Rainier, less spiky than Hood, its glaciers are puny and its immense southern flanks are dingy and gray.

Hours later, 3,000 feet closer to the top, a climber begins to see just how different this mountain is from all the others. At the summit, dust clouds swirl and eddy in the wind. Every step kicks up choking billows of throat-clogging, eye-scratching grit.

All is a vivid reminder of what happened on May 18, 1980. After a little more climbing you see for yourself what happened to Mt. St. Helens that day-it exploded.

After 123 years of peace, this young, active volcano erupted with thermonuclear force. The top 1,300 feet of the mountain were blasted away, sending ash 12 miles into the sky. The explosion killed 57 people and flattened 230 square miles of timber, creating a colorless moonscape of pumice and dust.

Like a lot of other recreational climbers, I had never gotten around to climbing St. Helens. Other summits always had more allure. Now, a few of us groused after the eruption, we`d never have a chance.

We were wrong. Here I was.

From the trailhead south of the mountain, St. Helens squats across the horizon and looms over the trees of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, offering no hint of the destruction on the other side. After so many years, I realized I`d forgotten just how huge this mountain is.

Many similarities at first

The beginning of the route is no different from countless others in the Northwest. The trail climbs easily through the tall pines along a streambed lined with huckleberry bushes. An early start means walking through dark forest for the first hour, covering two miles and a thousand feet of elevation.

When we broke out of the trees, the sky was pearling up, the sun barely breaking through the lowland fog. Stakes with dayglo orange runners showed the route up a spine of boulders and scree.

A sign told anyone who reaches this point that he needs a climbing permit to go any farther.

Even before the dust had settled, federal bureaucrats responsible for Mt. St. Helens realized they had an irresistible tourist lure on their hands. People wanted to see for themselves what happens when a volcano erupts.

Visitors oggled at the extent of the destruction: Thousands of trees snapped like sticks, rivers overrun with gray slurries of ash, the utter absence of animal or plant life.

This new-found curiosity and fascination with the destruction of Mt. St. Helens may have saved it. Of all the great Cascade peaks, St. Helens had been the least protected and most abused. Logging companies had surrounded the peaks with naked clearcuts, ringing the mountain with brown scars. In the aftermath of the eruption, St. Helens came to be seen as a unique natural laboratory, one with a new constituency that was demanding its protection.

Two years of wrangling

It took two years of political wrangling, but Congress created the 110,000-acre Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in 1982.

Hundreds of miles of old logging roads wind around the volcano for motorized sightseeing.

But to see St. Helens face to face, you have to climb it.

The feds made that possible in 1987 when they created a permit system that allows up to 100 climbers a day onto the upper mountain.

Our two-man party had moderate, if rusty, climbing experience-and several weeks of endurance training at home.

We had our permit. We had our water-seven heavy liters, since there`s no water on the mountain. We had extra clothing, preparation for the weather changes that can happen in the Cascades at any time. We had food, cameras and a rope, just in case the top was treacherous. We didn`t have any more than a vague idea just how tough the climb would be.

At the treeline on the Ptarmigan Trail (the most popular summit route) we stopped and rested. The easy part of the climb was over. From the beginning of the rocks to the summit is a 1.8-mile, 3,565-foot push. Working our way carefully up a spine of boulder piles and ashy flat spots, we could tell that even if it wasn`t a technically difficult climb, it was a slow, steep march.

An early start

Up and back was advertised as an 8-to-10-hour trip, so we figured a pre-dawn start was sensible. Halfway up Monitor Ridge we were glad for the early start for another reason-barely 8 a.m. and the heat already was building.

The silence of high places is a relative thing, but the silence on this mountain was complete. No trickle of glacier melt, no rattling rockfall, no bird calls. Just the wind and the dust.

Even when you`ve been warned repeatedly about the dust, you aren`t prepared completely for it-even on the relatively calm day we were lucky enough to have.

It grinds into your ears and nose and coats your mouth. Your clothes slowly become gray. It makes its way into your boots, no matter how much strapping tape you`ve wrapped around the collars of your boots to seal them.